


Atavistic Pie

by cofax



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-12
Updated: 2010-03-12
Packaged: 2017-10-07 22:19:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/69826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Teyla on the hive ship, after "The Seige".  Posted June 2005.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Atavistic Pie

She is choking.

 

Coughing, gasping, wrenching her head from side to side, she wakes herself. A thing that has never been, or so the Keeper would say. The Keeper she hears, she heard, whispering.

 

No one wakes in the pods: they sleep, ever. Cold and ageless and waiting until they are needed. Until hunger rules, and the life, the blood, is taken and taken and taken, nothing left but wisps, the crushed and dry leaves of winter. Unknowing, moving from sleep to death all unaware.

 

But Teyla wakes, choking.

 

She can move, a hand shifting, with difficulty, as if she is bound. And then easier. Are her eyes open? She cannot tell, can see nothing. The blood runs faster, sensation returning, and pain -- her head, her ribs. There was a battle.

 

~ Wraith surround them, appearing out of the air; she shoots, again and again, but they come forward, disregarding the bullets. She rages at the Earthers who spent so many months looking for their ZPM, and no time building better weapons against the Wraith. Bekken falls, and Airman Jones shrieks, and Teyla is forced back and back again, the gun chattering, smoking. When the cartridge runs dry she throws the useless weapon and draws her knives. She cuts one of them before the fall of light takes her.~

 

She knows where she is now. Perhaps this is the ship where her father had died, so many years ago. Perhaps in this space. The thought chills her -- she yanks at the bindings, and they fall away. Whatever they are, were, they are gone. She stands free.

 

How long? Teyla pats her hands over her face, touching the skin gingerly. Aging and ageless, the Keeper is, like the Kept. Like the Larder. There are no wrinkles.

 

She steps forward, hesitant; but her foot -- bare, like her arms -- touches softly down onto the floor. A surface alien after so long in Atlantis: flexible, cold, wrinkled. Alive.

Does the ship sleep? Where are her companions? Did the city fall, at the end? It must have, she thinks -- because Doctor Weir and Rodney had the bomb from the Genii. If they succeeded, she would not now be here.

Doctor McKay would look surprised, as if he did not expect logic from her. But then he looked that way at them all, even Major Sheppard.

 

~ She dreams the ship, the Keeper, the Kept. The hunger which lives always, even caged. History, memory: shadow reflecting in shadow, mirror upon mirror, and always the hunger. It burns in her, the hunger twisting her mind in on itself, showing the blood on her hands. She tastes it, and wakes, gagging.~

 

She does not know which way to go, so she turns left. One hand on the wall, she thinks, but she almost falls, and then she touches cold skin. Another pod.

 

Utter darkness: she cannot see if it is one of her people -- Earthers or Athosians, they are all hers in the darkness -- but the cloth under her hand is densely woven. She thinks it is a soldier and she fumbles up to a face.

 

He is old, battered, his hair clipped short, his jaw line heavy. "Everett," she whispers to herself. Before she remembers how much she dislikes the man, she pinches his cheek, hard. But there is no movement, no response. She shakes him, then. Not a twitch, not a groan.

 

He will not wake, and she cannot carry him. On his belt is a sheathed knife: she takes it. And the radio she cannot believe they left on him. He was not meant to wake. Nor was she.

 

She does not touch any more of the occupants of the pods: she cannot bear to find Halling here, or Sheppard, cold and unmoving. The pods go on for many paces in the darkness. Sometimes, she must stop; her head grows light, her balance uncertain. Those times, she crouches with her back to the wall.

 

~Sheppard's heart is strong with muscle, bound in blue cords of veins, pumping even in her palm. It gives under her teeth as she tears at it, the fierce richness of it, life-giving, life in death, the blood running down her arms, spotting her skirt.~

 

This time she does not gag, but the taste of blood lingers when she wakes; she licks her lips.

 

She feels stronger, when she should be weaker. The Wraith -- this is the wrong name, she knows, but the right name evades her, a moth escaping her hands -- are all awake, the hunger coursing through the great ship about her.

And they feed. She knows where; she has been drawn that way, an infant redfowl following its dam, a skeffeth on its way to the salt lick. Unknowing and instinctive.

But she is not this beast, she is Teyla daughter of Tagar, leader of her people, no matter how reduced. Her hand is dry on the hilt of Everett's knife; she pushes herself to her feet and continues on. Where there are Wraith there will be light. They do not live in the darkness forever, not now they have awoken.

 

~"Pie!" McKay takes a fork and holds it gently above the substance on his plate, as if prolonging the moment.

She raises an amused brow at him. "And that is?"

"You've never had pie, Teyla?" Ford slides into the chair next to her, also carrying a small plate with a wedge-shaped piece of an unfamiliar dish. All the foods of the Earthers are unfamiliar to her, but few have been greeted with such acclaim.

"Pie is one of the perfect foods," announces Sheppard, nudging McKay's chair to the side so he can fit in at the end of the table. McKay grumbles around a mouthful of the pie.

"So I see," Teyla agrees. "But what is it?"

They do not answer; instead they eat all the pie, then the plates, then the tables, and then they begin on one another. It is all very civilized, as the Earthers tend to be: McKay's blood is wet on Sheppard's lips, and he carefully wipes his mouth with a napkin. "See?" Sheppard opens his hand to her, but there is nothing left of it, just bone, striated with knife-marks where the flesh was carefully removed.~

 

When she is aware -- when she is not dreaming of hunger, blood, hunger -- she moves through the darkness. She doesn't follow the hunger: instead she steers around it. In her brain, when she is very still, she hears the whispers, and she follows the one whispering of darkness cold night stars.

 

There is light, at last. Her feet are bleeding; she suspects they will smell her soon, hear her in their minds; but their minds are feeding, blood hungry life love hungry -- so she has some time yet.

 

Perhaps enough. There is a large space here, starlight beyond the hunchbacked shadows.

 

A whisper, again -- there, not in her mind, but there, in the flesh, flush with blood and recent feeding -- but she is faster, she is Teyla, and the nearest ship is close, so close. She slips, blood beneath her feet, but she is there, and the ship greets her, murmuring in her mind. She cannot think, cannot quail, not now; she touches the panel and it springs to life, the doorway disappearing into the hull as it seals behind her.

"Out," she says, her first words since finding Everett, and it is enough: the ship -- a dart, perhaps the one that took her, took her father -- lifts, swings, is gone. Parts the field and is away, arrowing into the darkness, flying for the light.

 

~She sees the line of pods, all of them, hundreds. And she knows every face.~

 

There is no water on the dart, no provisions of any kind. Teyla remembers stories of men and women lost in the mountains, wandering in the desert, how they cut their arms and drank the blood.

She does not. She flies, the dart taking her backwards, knowing where it has been, remembering its own trail, unblurred by history. "How long?" she says once, but it cannot tell her. It is not alive, not even as much as the City of the Ancestors is. It cannot remember for her.

 

And then, after a long time, she is there. That great blue swirl of clouds and sea, drifting in the night. She touches the radio at last, lifts it to her mouth. There is nowhere else to go. She wonders if it can even reach so far: down to the surface, into the past, when she was more than this hunger.

"Atlantis, this is. This is Teyla Emmagan. Please respond."

 

~McKay crumbles, screaming. Doctor Weir fights, more fiercely than Teyla expected, but she has never used a knife, and Teyla has been trained since she was very young. The blood, so bright, nearly luminescent in the light of the open gate, pours out of the gash on that pale white throat. Teyla licks the edge of her blade, swallows. Rich, warm, health and life~

 

"--my god! Teyla? Teyla!?" Cheers ring through the cabin, thin and staticky from the radio speaker. "Major Sheppard, it's Teyla!"

She brings the dart down onto one of the empty piers, and lands roughly on its charred surface, the dart bouncing twice before slewing to a stop. Figures, familiar faces, approach and then stop: it is a dart, after all. They keep their weapons raised -- guns are no use against the Wraith, fools -- until she steps out uncertainly.

Stumbles, in truth, and collapses in the sunlight. Too bright, too hot. She feels hands on her then, lifting, and the world falls away. It is like the pod, but instead of darkness, hunger, dreams of blood, she dreams of soup.

When she wakes -- and like the first time, she knows it has been long -- when she wakes, the light is soft on her eyes, golden against the warm walls. She knows before she looks that she is in the infirmary, and that Sheppard sits next to her.

But she turns her head anyway, and he looks up from his book. There is a scar she doesn't remember above his right eyebrow, and this is new, this is different. There is no blood, she is not hungry. This is real.

He smiles. "Welcome back," is all he says. The rest can wait.

She sleeps.


End file.
